RUNTIME ZERO: Streaming The New Infinity (Dark Math Chronicles) Read online

  DARK MATH CHRONICLES

  RUNTIME ZERO

  Streaming the New Infinity

  Mick Brady

  © 2016 by Mick Brady

  Published by Blue City Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the author is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  ISBN-10: 0-996-88620-6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-996-88620-8

  Praise for

  Runtime Zero:

  “Sandpaper prose to scrape the cheap paint off your mind.”

  —Alan Kaufman, novelist, poet, and editor of

  The Outlaw Bible of American Literature

  “Spontaneous bebop prosody for the 21st Century.”

  —Bruce Daniels, editor, Albuquerque Journal

  “Runtime Zero propels the reader into an imaginative world

  with a personal story that will long be remembered.”

  —James D. McFarlin, author, Aftershock: A Novel

  “If James Joyce dropped acid

  and wrote a sci-fi novel, this would be it.''

  —Robert Brady, author, The Big Elsewhere

  To Liz, my real-life Juliette,

  who finally taught me how to fly

  CONTENTS

  1. SUBVERSA

  2. THE MAKER

  3. QUANTUM ART

  4. THE MOTHERSHIP

  5. BREATHERS

  6. SHE RUN COOL

  7. BLEEDERS

  8. THE PARADOX

  9. THE TRUFFLE

  10. DARK MATH

  11. THE FACTORY

  12. ELEVATOR MUSIC

  13. PURGATORIO

  14. A PERFECT BLUE FIRE

  I saw the angel in the marble

  and I carved until I set him free.

  —Michelangelo Buonarotti

  1

  SUBVERSA

  Even before he stepped from the swirling pillar of mist in Sandbox 12, Chrome could feel himself shrinking in the face of a great emptiness, as if his identity had been checked at the door like a wet raincoat. By rezzing into a digital body, he had voluntarily surrendered most of the reference points that were central to his sense of self in the atomic world. Now the old soul, the booster rocket, the Will Powers imprint, was falling back to Earth, and with it many of the things he once measured himself by, things that had given him substance and stature in the other life. The loss of this mental skeleton left him floundering like a jellyfish in a Texas roadhouse. “Helluva way to start the day for a master of the universe,” he said to no one.

  Sandbox 12 was a great, flat, smooth expanse of blinding-white sand stretching as far as the eye could see, an immense chamber of silence presided over by an almost tangible blue void with nary a cloud in sight. A great copper disk hovered low on the horizon, roiled by a layer of visually convincing heat waves. In direct contrast to his life as a breather, he now felt his very soul being sucked out into the desert air, leaving him empty, aching, and struggling to understand why, after all those years of preparation, he had been thrust into such a desolate point of entry. This wasn’t the paradise he had been looking for.

  Recalling one of the bullet points from his orientation in the training chamber, he swiped his hand in the air and a luminous display appeared, clear as crystal and studded with an array of options. One click brought up an instant overview of the local grid, providing the names, locations, and profiles of any other avatars in the area, whether they were sky dwellers, diggers, or flat-out surface monkeys. Damned if the map wasn’t just as barren as the landscape itself. “Hell, I might as well be adrift in outer space,” he thought, as a dying star slammed into the horizon with a dull thud.

  Zooming out on the map, he noticed a small yellow dot crawling across the grid from the far corner of the northeast quadrant, and when he glanced up over the screen, he spotted a plume of dust headed his way. Double clicking on the dot got him a close-up of the vehicle, a classic ’64 Alfa Romeo GTV, dusty silver, along with a brief profile of its driver, a dazzling diva wrapped tightly in the lacy doublet of an Elizabethan courtier.

  Name: Quintessential Flux

  Genus: Motherlord

  The rest was mind candy. He was good to go by the time she got there, and when she did, the very arc and vapor of his new life blew right through him.

  The yellow dot soon became a silver juggernaut, sliding sideways toward him in a cloud of dust, finally coming to rest within inches of his new feet. Before he could even look inside, the driver reached over and opened the door.

  “Welcome to SubVersa, Chrome. Hop in.”

  “Thanks for the lift, umm…” he said, banging his head as he climbed in, his sleek metal hair ringing like a silver bell. “Sorry; can’t seem to keep track of my body in here.”

  “Don’t worry; you’ll get used to it in no time. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” He was soon awash in her smiling eyes, a vast azure sea for a soul to swim in, and beginning to feel a hunger for things he didn’t even know existed.

  “Wow…thanks…a few more minutes and you would have had to pick me up with a shovel.”

  She began to explain why his internal landscape had been erased, pointing out that if he had entered this world with his human identity intact, he would have disintegrated like a chunk of space debris hitting the earth’s atmosphere. Fortunately, most of the impurities of his previous life had been removed before he even reached the training chamber.

  “Yeah, I get it; a clean reboot. Theoretically, then, I should run a lot smoother in here,” he said, beaming at her. When she didn’t respond, he said, “Say, what’s your username again?”

  “Call me Quin.”

  “Thanks, Quin.” He glanced around at the leather and wood interior. “Very impressive,” he thought to himself. “Just like the one my maker wrapped around a streetlight one night back on planet Earth.”

  “Yes, I’m familiar with the story of your maker,” she said, startling him. “This is yours, by the way; I threw it together this morning. Something familiar, something to soften the landing.”

  “You made this? For me? I’m speechless. How can I thank you?”

  “My pleasure, really. But don’t worry, Chrome; there’ll be plenty of opportunities to thank me. Ready to explore?”

  “Explore? Seems like I’ve seen it all just by standing on my tiptoes.”

  “In here, nothing is as it seems. It’s a shimmering world of reimaginings, a land of liquid energy. Hang on.” He was suddenly thrust back against the red leather seat as the Alfa rocketed forward, lifting off the desert floor and banking sharply toward the falling sun. They were closing in on twilight.

  As it was in the original world, the sun grew brighter as they raced it to the horizon. Far below, vivid ribbons of color began to appear on the desert floor, filigree rippling in the heat, shifting, changing as they soared over them. The ribbons became a pattern which grew, twisted, and churned until it blossomed into its full-blown interlocking glory: a giant, sprawling, multihued mandala, as big as a small city. As they descended in a soft downward spiral, it
soon became clear that this was a real sand painting, the very metaphor for impermanence, on a scale unimaginable.

  To top it off, sitting smack dab in the middle of it all, like a cherry on a cake, was a full-on midcentury American carnival, complete with carousels, roller coasters, calliopes, and cotton candy, and teeming with vintage avatars. The Alfa touched down like a feather just outside the entrance to the midway, and it was there, between the broad bands of red and gold sand, in the whirling dust and shadow of the Ferris wheel, to the tinny sound of an organ grinder, that Chrome got his first taste of life in this new world. He was instantly and utterly intoxicated.

  2

  THE MAKER

  Will arrived in Manhattan during the age of sorcery known as the Sixties, flush from all the crush and buzz surrounding his incendiary Hells Angel painting, hailed by critics as “an homage to protean sexual power and visceral freedom,” and so on. Once that first intoxicating whiff of fame had taken hold, visions of a celestial city began to dance in his head like a spaceship all aglitter, with God and William Blake at the helm, beaming rays of hope into the damp darkness of his dreams.

  One summer morn, after a night of sweat and disappointment, he arose from his lover’s bed and slipped behind the wheel of a dusty blue VW bus crammed with oozing tubes of acrylic paint, coffee cans full of paint-frosted brushes, rolls of raw canvas, gallons of gesso; books, more books, and the finest jazz collection a starving artist could buy. He was headed south, down the New York State Thruway, to Gotham, to the Emerald City, to Babylon…the first level of the inferno.

  That first, bewitching summer, Will found himself in a swirling whirl of artists, musicians, poets, hippies, and street wizards, all randomly tossed into the East Village stew with the last big wave of immigrants—ethnic Ukrainians, mostly, the only ones who weren’t perpetually stoned, a sturdy tribe who stoically tolerated the growing circus in their midst, biding their time until it was their turn to step out into the American Dream.

  After a few months of floating around town, staying with friends, scrambling for cash, and hunting for a space, he stumbled onto an empty storefront on 10th Street off Tompkins Square, right around the corner from the Peace Eye Bookstore, where Ed Sanders and Allen Ginsberg were writing the script for the coming revolution. He built a sleeping loft in the back room behind the kitchen and began working in the wide-open space of the storefront. The ancient brick walls were soon checkered with canvases, the well-worn floors spattered with paint. A beat-up old coffeepot bubbled in the background, brewing an endless batch of fuel for his fertile mind.

  A river of morning light cascaded in from the street, bouncing off the smooth wooden floors, filling in the spaces with warmth and energy. It seemed to set the paintings ablaze, drawing a moveable sea of faces to the big window, faces that followed his every move as he worked on the giant canvases. This small, rapt audience turned the studio into a kind of street theater, his fevered painting into a kind of performance art. The music pounding through his homegrown speakers provided each new painting with its own soundtrack and a backbeat for his flying feet. Having traded drumsticks for paintbrushes, the former drummer for The Bravados was now painting with the colors of rhythm and blues, ’cause, hey, man, you paint pretty for the people, you just might get you some sat-is-fac-tion.

  Some mornings, Mona Lisa came padding out of the back room in Will’s old Syracuse sweatshirt, half awake, cradling a cup of coffee, strolling right through the cluttered studio and out onto the sidewalk to talk to one of their new friends, one of the regulars, one of those she knew by name. Will didn’t mind; when he was buried in a painting he was gone, real gone, and she truly knew he’d rather make art than talk about it. And so there she was, the girl he’d once traded for the big city, keeping up his end of the conversation while he provided color commentary. Love was full of surprises.

  There were always two or three paintings going at once, the maxim being to keep one alive while the others dried. The look was tough; the tone, high contrast; the feel, blunt, romantic, and unambiguous; the style, urban pop. He painted machines in motion—cars, trucks, bicycles, motorcycles—all turning, twisting, as if trying to break free of the canvas and careen into another world.

  “Wonder where the hell they’re goin’,” Royko, a neighbor and fellow artist, once said. “Wherever it is, man, it sure looks like they’re dying to get there.”

  Will thought for a minute. “They’re headed straight for your mind’s eye at the speed of light, Royko, which tends to bend around a curve, lending the illusion of danger; but it’s the poor souls in Grant Wood’s painting who are really dying to get there,” he said. A print of Death on Ridge Road, one of Will’s favorite works, was hanging in the back room.

  “Your head’s on fire, man, you know that? Your…fucking…head…is on fire.” Royko looked at him for a minute, then walked away, grinning.

  Will had been drawing his getaway dreams since the day his bike was stolen from behind the Delaware Theater while he and his brother were rooting for the good guys at a Saturday matinee. As he stood there in the alley that day, thunderstruck at the magnitude of his loss, he realized that his last, best hope of outrunning his demons was gone. In this new, cold reality, there would never be another chance to fly.

  This, just weeks after his father ran off with the perfume lady at Whitney’s department store, where he was the window display man. Will was still reeling from those final, tearful moments with his dad before he pulled out of the VFW Post parking lot in their new ’49 Merc headed for Reno while Will stood there, collapsing inwardly like a slo-mo demolition, tumbling all the way down into his shoes. He was left staring into a billowing cloud of dust as his father missed the driveway by a couple of feet and careened, bumping and lurching, out of his life forever. The cloud was all that remained.

  His family soon migrated to the slums and, before long, they pawned everything they owned, including his beloved hunting knife with the twelve-point buck etched right into the blade, all majestic under the waterfall. It was a last, desperate attempt to avoid the crushing shame of welfare, but after a few long, hungry weeks, there they were, hats in hand, shuffling together down the long gray hallways of the social services center. By then, the only thing he had left was the untested power of his imagination.

  Drawing a fleet of low-slung chariots—sleek, sinewy, fire-breathing monsters that pounded their tires in the dust—became a handy way to avoid locking himself in the bathroom at night with the one thing his dad had left behind in his blind flight to freedom—a rusty old Gillette blue blade. Fighting pain with pain, he tried to bleed out the demons that were hissing in his ear, insisting he was the one who drove his father out the door. On one of those nights, the mix of blood and water circling the drain triggered a memory of his father stumbling into the kitchen in the middle of the night, living-dead drunk, soaking wet, and covered with blood after falling facedown into the wading pool on his way home from the Post. As Will watched this last, bittersweet memory run down the drain, he decided it was better to get lost in layers of hand-rubbed cherry lacquer on a pretty little roadster or tease apart the shadows on a full moon hubcap, than to carve another notch in his arm. Life was tough, but dreams were free, and drawing a fleet of dream machines was an easy way to tweak a poorly designed universe.

  He didn’t know it then, but those drawings were the prototypes of the mind rockets that would one day set him free. Those graphite roadsters with fat black tires and silver wheels had the power to erase all memory of his stripped-down gunmetal bike, setting his dreams in motion. They were the imaginary chariots of his future, like the Alfa coupe he would wrap around a pole in the drunken-hearted sadness and madness of his Black Irish youth, or the cherry-red Triumph that would carry him, floating, into Woodstock on a cloud of ganja. They were the early blueprints of his midnight rides in the Mothership, and finally, they were a foreshadowing of the phantom motorcycle that would one day carry his digital angel into the heart of Babylon. He was bu
ilding a fleet of spiritual machines, longing for lift-off.

  Some months later, after one decidedly joyous session in the studio—a time when the whole world seemed to disappear—he stood back, surveyed all that he had done, and saw that it was good. There was light, and there was darkness. There was motion, and there was stillness. There was strength and weakness, joy and sadness. But above all, there was a window to another world—a land of light and shadow that any one of these chariots could reach at a moment’s notice.

  Why this was so, he didn’t know. But he hadn’t yet seen the celestial city hovering in the clouds above him as he lay suspended, dream-floating on the surface of a blue mountain lake. He hadn’t yet heard the poem at the center of the universe, or learned that the stars were fueled by the same energy that ran through his mind. Then, and only then, would it become clear that all God’s children were angels trapped within a ring of fire, and one by one, Will would take them home.

  3

  QUANTUM ART

  “It’s like dancing with angels. Just let go, and it’ll flow,” Juliette said, one foot bouncing off her knee as she lay stretched out on the floor of the art cube.

  Chrome, sitting with his back against the chopper, glanced over with a smile, then buried himself once more in the tedious task of scanning image codes on the airscreen. “If only it were that simple,” he thought. The Quantum Art exhibit was just weeks away, and he was losing focus. His mind was adrift in the ebb and flow of long ago, whispers of other worlds streaming through his head in an endless loop—tantalizing bits of data, agonizingly familiar, virtually indecipherable. He had to let go, kick himself back into gear, and get on with his work. This would be his last show in SubVersa, and there was no time for daydreaming.

  The art cube itself was as big as a couple of cargo containers, every wall covered with a riotous carnival of nude drawings, splattered paint and bullet-riddled sheet metal, an iconic banana logo floating in the center like an erotic piñata. There were no shadows in here; each surface was its own source of light, evoking a dizzying sense of weightlessness, erasing all sense of direction. Chrome and his muse were immersed in a work of art.